The National Latin Vocabulary Exam tests what it says it tests: the Latin vocabulary and inflected forms appropriate to each student’s level of study. There is no surrounding passage to draw on, no context to narrow a guess. Either the words are known, in the precise forms the language requires, or they are not. Thirty Emerson Latin students sat the examination this year. Nineteen of them earned Gold Medals. The full record is set down below.
- Charles Cho
- Jaye Cho
- Antony Choi
- Hyunchan Choi
- Jeongho Hong
- Jian Hong
- Riwon Hwang
- Gio Hyung
- Ara Kim
- Hunjae Lee
- Olivia Lee
- Rachel Lee
- Yejin Lee
- Yerim Lee
- Chaeeun Park
- Sophia Park
- Victoria Park
- Jewon Shin
- Jehyeong Suh
- Jinny Baek
- Seunghyo Jeong
- Minchae Kang
- Lynn Kim
- Suhjung Kim
- Minkyung Lee
- Hannah Oh
- Jeongho Woo
- Eunwoo Yoo
- Alyssa Han
- Soyoung Kang
Nineteen Gold Medals. The figure is worth sitting with for a moment. This is not a large academy sending a hundred students to a single examination and collecting medals by volume. The students who place here are placed individually, each tested at their own level, each result independent of the others. When nineteen of thirty sitting students earn a Gold Medal in a competition that tests nothing but how well the Latin vocabulary has been absorbed — not inferred from context, not reconstructed from roots, but known outright in the forms the language demands — it points to something systematic about the instruction and something serious about the students who receive it.
Several names here appear elsewhere in this year’s record: Victoria Park, Jehyeong Suh, Rachel Lee, Yejin Lee among others — students placing across multiple examinations in the same year, in different disciplines, at different levels of difficulty. That pattern is as worth noting as any individual result. We congratulate all thirty who sat, and all thirty who placed.